Tajikistan

10/12/2013

WikiLeaks barged into offices all over Central Asia, pressuring independent journalists like these reporters at the highly-respected Asia Plus to instantly sign agreements on WikiLeaks' terms to publish US cables about their country.Here Marat Mamadshoev and a colleague are being told to sign the agreement immediately, but decline.

This is my quick take upon first view of this video (so sorry if there are mistakes or names missing, they will be fixed). It's available for rent ($2.99) or pay $7.00 plus on Vimeo. Naturally, I'm unhappy that I had to give a dime to WL, which I oppose on principle -- and I have to wonder how it is that Paypal could agree to accept these payments when it has blocked payments directly from WikiLeaks (and I plan to raise this issue with both Vimeo and PayPal).

This piece of vile stuff is supposed to be Assange's attempt to provide an "antidote" to a movie about him coming out in theaters October 18 which he doesn't like called The Fifth Estate (it's too critical) which he trying to kill off in various ways.

Perhaps he's counting on the fact that most people don't know anything about Central Asia, and will merely be impressed that he and his merry band of hacksters caroming around the perilous but picturesque mountain roads of Central Asia -- complete with Soviet-style policeman stopping and searching traffic, tunnels under repair until who knows when, and lots of sheep blocking the road -- are the coolest of cypherphunk hipsters going on a " journalism" trip through dangerous territory.

So an unintended bonus is that with Wahlstrom narrating most of the film -- when the Great One Himself isn't butting in and pontificating -- is that WikiLeaks cannot claim anymore that Shamir and Son don't have anything to do with them and don't represent them. They most surely do, as this film proves.

Johannes is a Russian speaker because he likely grew up in Russia or at least speaking Russian with his father -- who has played a sordid role in the Snowden affair, too, about which you can read on my other blog, Minding Russia. But he and the other handlers or minders or whoever the hell they are really have no sense of this region, whatever their Russian language ability, and burst in aggressively -- and disgustingly -- to try to strong-arm local news media in dire straits in Central Asia, where there is a huge list of murdered, jailed, disappeared and beaten journalists, into publishing WikiLeaks cables.

Another bonus is that one of the Russian-speaking journalists on the tour admits openly that he fabricated stories at his job (supposedly because he felt himself to be pressured to do so by his bosses and their need to sell newspapers) and then was ultimately fired. This is just about the level of journalistic quality we can expect throughout this film.

(The reason I mixed up Wahlstrom and this Russian in an earlier version of this blog, since corrected is because both are accused of fabrications; the Russian admits it in the film, Wahlstrom denies it. And while some WikiLeaks operative @Troushers is accusing me of "lying" here in my summary of the dialogue of this Russian journalist, I stand by it -- indeed he openly admits he fabricated letters and indeed the implication is that he was pressured by his boss, who needed to sell papers even if he didn't say literally that phrase -- Internet kids are so literalist. The obvious reality is, the theme throughout the entire film is that editors and journalists in mainstream media only do things to sell newspapers -- i.e. the obvious point of the snarky portrayal of Bill Keller and Sulzberger talking about traffic for a column of Bill's "half supportive" of Obama. Here's the script verbatim from Dmitry Velikovsky, from Russkiy Reporter, who has been active in covering Manning's trial in the past. Russkiy Reporter also sponsored the showing of the film in Moscow.

Velikovsky: I began with some funny study. I was obliged to edit the column "letters of readers". But the problem was that there were absolutely no letters to edit. But the column should be published twice a day. And so I was obliged to to invent those letters me myself. And I just invented a lot of them.

Wahlstrom: did you get some, any letters at all from real readers?

Velikovsky: Yes we got some maybe three, four or five in two months but they were all containing some critics.

Wahlstrom: but these letters you didn't publish.

Velikovsky: I wanted to publish those letters in the factual content of the newspaper because I found it rather important to have some kind of self criticism. But our marketing department had no self criticism and they forbid me to publish it. So i invented letters about problems of veterans, problems of pensioners, problems of no matter whom. So that's how I became a journalist.

Cue tinkly music...

Astoundingly, this aggressive, beligerent crew have no sense of themselves in this film, so imbued are they with their self-righteousness, even as they beam in Julian Assange on Skype who instructs the locals how they are to treat this material.

It's very clear WikiLeaks has absolutely no interest in the substance of the local stories, they just want to collect partners -- or conversely, shame those potential partners who refuse to deal with them for various reasons by making them look like they are boot-licking lackeys of the United States.

They tape phone conversations with people that are rather sensitive -- like a journalist in danger discussing whether he should publish a story about somebody who wants to run a coup in Tajikistan (!) -- and we have no idea if the people involved were informed that these calls would be taped -- and included in the film.

The single most damaging aspect I've seen in this agitprop trash is that the utterly unsupported claim is made that the local press are paid by the US Embassy to print flattering things about the US in order to get the leaders and publics of these countries to bend over while the US uses them as a launching pad and staging area for their war in Afghanistan.

The WikiLeaks people are too ignorant and blinded by their anti-American ideology to understand that a) the US has no need for this because these countries have cooperated anyway b) these tyrants have their own interests in playing off the US against Russia and China c) it doesn't matter as the US is pulling out of Afghanistan next year anyway.

Now, I write as someone who for six years worked at EurasiaNet and Open Society Foundation and wrote critically about the US role in Central Asia, particularly about the severe human rights and humanitarian issues -- about which the US government was oftne silent -- and the issues around the Northern Distribution Network, the supply path to Afghanistan from Russia which enabled the US to bring non-lethal cargo to NATO troops.

I also worked in the past as a free-lancer for RFE/RL ("(Un)Civil Society" and "Media Matters") and never experienced any censorship -- I wrote and published directly to the site. I recall only instances when care was taken in covering mass demonstrations once in Ukraine to make sure that the article didn't incite people -- as RFE/RL has a history of being charged with causing uprisings, i.e. in the Hungarian revolution and invasion by Soviet troops. RFE/RL is funded by Congress, but it doesn't have overlords hanging over you as you write -- there is far more independent coverage there than anything you'd see at RT.com, the Kremlin-sponsored propaganda outlet or Al Jazeera.

I have no relationship whatsoever to the US government, so I am certainly qualified to say that this film is an unfair hatchet job on people in harm's way -- oh, so typical of WikiLeaks.

The film opens with the WikiLeaks crew rolling through the mountains with Mehrabanb Fazrollah of Pyandj, Tajikistan, born 18 October 1962, in the back seat of the car telling his story. He was held five years in Guantanamo about which you can read some here.

Through a series of astoundingly leading questions, broad innuendos or outright promptings, the WL gang incites Fazrollah into saying he really knew nothing of any military significance, and his jailing was all for nothing, and boy is he mad. I don't know anything of his case except what I've read in the papers, but the duplicitious smiles and repeating of what foreigners want to hear are very old stories to me from having traveled in this region (I haven't ever been in Tajikistan but I've spent years travelling to Russia and other countries and interviewing Tajiks outside of Tajikistan).

Assange claims bitterly that this poor fellow spent five years ""to find out about a couple of fucking refugees in Tajikistan".

Actually, that's not even what the cable said or even what the man in the film says. They said there were 100,000 refugees. This is relevant of course regarding the Northern Alliance and the Tajiks in Afghanistan. The fellow is charged with membership in the Islamic Movement of Tajikistan (IMT) allied with the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a group on the American list of terrorist organizations.

Sorry, but this is not nothing, these are real terrorism movements, even if supposedly in decline (like, you know, Al Shabaab was in decline and chased out of their stronghold when they hit Westgate Mall in Kenya?)

You would never know from Assange's sneers that this is a country that was in a civil war for years, that it had the highest number of journalists murdered -- some 50, nearly as many as Algeria, also in a civil war at the time, that these journalists were killed by Islamists because they were secular or visa versa because they were not approved Muslims killed by state security. The war is a complicated one but to pretend that terrorism and war isn't a factor here -- right next to Afghanistan -- is absurd.

This is of course the game, too, of the International Relations Realist school in Washington and elsewhere, who minimize terrorism and laugh it away as a fantasy of Pentagon planners. But the reality is that both are true -- real terrorist acts have occurred here and there are in fact real Islamists pressuring secular society including press, and there are also fake terrorists that the oppressive government thinks up to keep itself in power. And you know something? I surely do not trust Julian Assange and his crew of losers to tell the difference.

I will never forget in my life the terrified face of a Tajik journalist who had been receiving death threats that I helped rescue from Tajikistan in the 1990s -- and it was a brave man going the extra mile inside the US Embassy actually that got him and his family out of there.

In the film, after reading some cables on Gitmo -- and as I said, the cases may be innocent, but the WL goons are hardly the judge, and there are real complex problems of terrorism and pressure on secularism in these countries -- Assange and Wahlstrom sit and guffaw about a line in a memo they've found about Bildt getting in touch with Karl Rove instead of really trying to understand the complexities of the region They find this such a smoking gun and so "evil" that they roar for minutes, but we don't get the joke.

The translator asks outrageously leading questions and they all laughed and carried on and made it clear they sympathized with the Tajik taken from the battlefield from Gitmo and don't interview him impartially or critically at all. In the same way the pick up a memo from someone named Michael Owens, and start roaring about the US "empire of the 21st century" -- which is of course a rather lack-luster claim these days -- some empire of the 21st century which they are just now leaving, eh?

Then they read from cables -- only partially -- with a "scene-setter" -- talking about how the Tajiks have "unfailingly" allowed their overflights, which is all they really wanted from them. They then purport to read from a cable implying that these "imperialist Americans" in Dushanbe want to "make the local media more pro-American" and will first plant positive stories in the Russian media, then pay the local media to reprint them in the local press.

They don't actually cite from any document or give any source, and it isn't in any known cable from the WikiLeaks Cablegate already published that the US Embassy engages in this practice.

So without anything to bolster this claim, WikiLeaks smears gazeta.ru, Interfax, and Ekho Moskvy, claiming that they've somehow engaged in this practice.

It really is an outright lie. I have read the Russian-language press in this region for years. They are critical of the US and there aren't these glowing planted pieces they imagine. And the US doesn't need to engage in such a silly, crude practice.

Secondly, none of these papers in the region have very big readerships -- they don't have the capacity. We are talking about newspapers with 50,000 or 100,000 or 500,000 possibly at the most, but more at the low end. It's just not a way to reach people. Internet penetration is very low in some of the countries -- it's about 60% in Russia but drops down sharply as you go East.

The US already has Voice of America as an outlet to cover the perspectives of the US, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty which serves to enhance or enable struggling local media -- they have open partnerships with some local stations, and because they are far more independent than the official media of these authoritarian states, they have more credibility. To be sure, RFE/RL are not going to be radically antithetical to the foreign policy of the United States, any more than the BBC or Al Jazeera or RT.com. But unlike Al Jazeera and RT.com, RFE/RL really tries to cover critical local news without fear or favour, and proof of that is just how many journalists have been arrested, jailed or expelled over the decades. The US government doesn't need to crudely pay somebody to hide behind, in other words. But these, too, don't have a huge audience outside the intelligentsia in the big cities.

The fact is, WikiLeaks has not produced proof of this disreputable claim, because they've cited one cable only partially where it sounds like a proposal that one doesn't know was fulfilled, and in citing another cable, in Kyrgyzstan, it appears that the Kyrgyz foreign minister presents this idea, and that it doesn't come from the Americans.

To be sure, paid-for press and infomercials and advertorials are rampant in this region in the official and unofficial press. But to claim that these brave independent outlets take payments to portray te US nicely is just an outright smear for which there isn't an iota of proof. It puts these brave people in danger to suggest it.

This was the question addressed by Yulia Nikitina of MGIMO (the Moscow State Institute of International Relations) during her policy memo presentation and discussion at the annual two-day PONARS conference.

Because I asked it.

Her talk was actually about "How the CSTO Can (and Cannot) Help NATO" -- given the 2014 withdrawal of NATO forces from Afghanistan. "Afghanistan is on its way to becoming a missed opportunity for NATO-CSTO cooperation," she said -- and she wasn't really delving into the nature of the CSTO per se and why NATO may not wish this cooperation.

But naturally, cooperation does hinge on the nature of the CSTO and its intentions.

Nikitina's talk came just as a summit of the CSTO was completed, and a statement was released that the security group did not plan to add more troops to Tajikistan, but planned to help Tajikistan "strengthen its border" in light of 2014.

To put this in perspective, think of 6,000 Russian troops already in Tajikistan, considerable wrangling still over how much Russia will pay Tajikistan for its base there and other arrangements, and a border more than 1,000 kilometers long.

The numbers of troops available in the CSTO -- which Uzbekistan has not joined -- is not officially released, but here's what Nikitina has to say:

In 2012, hard security issues disappeared from the agenda of potential CSTO-NATO cooperation. They were replaced by an emphasis on conflict resolution and crisis management, to which in 2013 peacekeeping was added. But what specifically can the CSTO offer in the fields of crisis management and peacekeeping?

The CSTO has four types of collective forces. These include two regional groups of military forces (Russia-Belarus and Russia-Armenia), prepared to react to external military aggression; a 4,000-strong Collective Rapid Deployment Force for Central Asia; a 20,000-strong Collective Rapid Reaction Force (both of which have been designed to react to crises short of interstate conflicts); and collective peacekeeping forces, including about 3,500 soldiers and military officers and more than 800 civilian police officers (exact figures for all types of forces are not publicly available).

So the last "collective peace-keeping forces" which isn't the same thing as the Collective Rapid Deployment Force, has 4,300 troops, but roughtly a fifth of them are civilian police officers. Interesting.

Basically, my question was this (with some explanation in parentheses):

In 2010, during the pogroms in southern Kyrgyzstan in Osh and Jalalabad, then-acting President Otunbayeva reportedly asked the CSTO to come in and help restore order. (At least 400 people were killed in these ethnic riots, thousands injured, and hundreds of thousands displaced, many temporarily to neighbouring Uzbekistan.)

All along before then, the CSTO said they were not designed to handle internal unrest, and that was not their purpose, but they were asked anyway, and we know there were emergency meetings about this question in Kyrgyzstan.

I had understood from talking to some diplomats that Uzbekistan opposed having the CSTO deployed in its "back yard" so to speak (as they disliked the encroachment of what they saw as a Russian-dominated entity - and that's why they refuse to join it - in a neighbour that already had several Russian bases and at that time the US base as well in Manas.)

So the CSTO was not deployed in Kyrgyzstan (and I could add that the effort to get some 50 police from the OSCE countries to deploy for "technical assistance" to the Kyrgyz authorities was also pretty much demolished because the all-powerful mayor of Osh did not want foreign meddling and Bishkek did not have control over him).

In any event, after these tragic events, this question was further discussed and in due course, you heard CSTO head Borduzhya and even Foreign Minister Lavrov speak of adding the competency to address mass unrest to the tasks of the CSTO.

Will they? I also asked if these troops could be deployed in Tajikistan, where an armed
group was involved in clashes with law enforcement in which 30 or more
were killed last year.

Likely there are others more knowledgeable about the details but I think it's good to ask Russians directly about this because they don't seem to want to define either what "extremism" is or what "unrest" is or anything about this.

Vladimir Putin also proposed using the CSTO forces in the capacity of peace-keeping forces.

This was first discussed after June 2010, during the period of inter-ethnic clashes in Kyrgyzstan, when CSTO forces could not interfere in the conflict due to the absence of legal mechanisms.

Of course, peace-keeping and unrest-stopping are really different things as the UN endlessly learns to its chagrin -- but I thought I'd ask.

That Izvestiya piece made it sound like it was a mere absence of legal mechanisms, although we knew it was both an absence of political will (on Russia's part) and an unwillingness to have deployment encroaching sovereignty on others' part.

In any event, Nikitina replied with that tone of prickly, moral-equivalency high dudgeon that seems to characterize so many interactions with the official Russian intelligentsia these days.

She said she often got this sort of question and "just couldn't understand it". After all, no one expected NATO to go to the south of France in 2005, she noted tartly. You can't just have military alliances going hither and yon, and so on.

It wasn't the sort of format where I could object that NATO wasn't invited to the south of France, and 400 people weren't killed in the south of France, and half a million didn't flee over the border, either.

In any event, she said she didn't know about Uzbekistan objecting, but in fact, she said, Belarus objected. (I had never heard that before).

Belarus said that it would be hard to tell the Kyrgyz and Uzbeks apart, Nikitina noted. I would like to think that what Belarus meant by this was not that "all Central Asians look alike" but that civilians and marauders would be hard to tell apart.

Of course, you could start just by separating, oh, the men riding around in police or army vehicles that mysteriously seemed to become available to them, wielding guns also mysteriously obtained, and stop them from going into places with women in scarves carrying young children and fleeing in panic. That should be fairly easy to "tell apart". In any event, urban hand-to-hand combat is a difficult setting and I'm not going to tell the military or police their business. I really don't know if Russian-led troops swooping into Osh might have made a difference -- especially if they didn't have a robust Chapter 7 equivalent sort of mandate to actually battle the pogromshchiki. I can't imagine that the attitude toward Russian-led forces would be intrinsically welcoming, either, although Otunbayeva, herself educated in Moscow, reportedly did ask.

In any event, I also asked Nikitina if 4000 troops was enough to do the job. She didn't answer. The thrust of what she replied -- and I await the videotape -- was that while response to disorders and/or extremist attacks was now in the remit of the CSTO, it was mainly about inter-state interactions.

She also stressed that the involvement of the CSTO in a domestic matter could only be at the invitation of the country itself.

I do think we are not back to a Warsaw Pact type of situation where the need to protect peace-loving fraternal socialist peoples serve as an excuse to do something like invade Czechoslovakia.

Of course, what we don't know is what would happen if there was a situation such as has occurred in Kyrgyzstan, where mobs end up toppling corrupt governments, sometimes it seems with some very skilled help (those sharpshooters you can see in some videos skilfully hiding behind trees and moving to scale fences didn't get those bazookas out of a tulip bed).

i.e. if Russian special forces stealthily took down a government, mixing in with mobs, and then whistled for the CSTO to put down any one objecting.

Or a scenario like in Moscow itself in August 1991, where one government leader is spirited far away and kept under house arrest, and an illegitimate coup plotters' committee appears, and then another government leader comes on tanks and defeats the coup plot but deposes the leader taken into exile. See, any one of those figures could be whistling for a CSTO. Then what? Which are the fraternal peace-loving peoples?

Nikitina seemed to indicate that invitations for such deployment might only be a remote possibility.

There are other troubles -- Uzbekistan isn't in the CSTO, and Nazarbayev, head of Kazakhstan didn't come to the summit, even though he wasn't sick and ended up having meetings at home and then going to Monaco. Monaco?! What's that about? "I could have come and chatted with all of you about what we're going to do when hordes of terrorists come pouring over the Afghan border into our countries and destabilize us in 2014, but instead, I chose to go speak to the Prince."

Says Izvestiya:

President Nazarbayev’s presence was important; after all the foundation for the military component of the CSTO is the Collective Rapid Reaction Forces (CRRF). These are the divisions that will actively participate in various operations. For now, the lion’s share of the CRRF are made up of Russian and Kazakh soldiers.

All of this requires further watching and research. Where have there been Russian "peace-keepers"? Well, in Abkhazia and Southern Ossetia.

How would the CSTO peace-keep? Like ECOWAS or the African Union?

Thinking of all the cases of violent unrest in Central Asia in the last 20 years, Andijan stands out as the worst or among the worst -- and Uzbekistan is not part of the reaction force or the peace-keeping force (I'd love to know more about how they differ). Kyrgyzstan is part of the CSTO, but there is already this precedent where it wasn't deployed because of objections and difficulties.

03/31/2013

This is my little blog on Tajikistan that comes out on Saturdays. If you are unable to click on all the links, come to my blog Different Stans as these can be blocked by some mail systems.
Write me at catfitzny@yahoo.com with comments or requests to be added to
the mailing list.

o Opposition Leader Missing Abroad...o ...And Government Critic Missing at Homeo Russians Leaving Tajikistan in Droves...o...and Tajik Migrants Returning from Russia in Coffinso Everybody Worries About the Tajik Porous Border...o...But at Least OSCE Tries to Do Something About It

o Earthquake...and Harlem Shakes...

COMMENT

People explain the missing opposition leader abroad and the missing region critic at home by the same factor: the forthcoming presidential election coming up in November of this year. Why it's necessary to disappear people, when you're going to sail through to an overwhelming victory with the same dubious high percentage for the win as all your Central Asian neighbours is beyond me, but perhaps that one tug on the thread unravels the whole thing...

What I think people need to understand about disappearances is that you don't have to be an exemplary citizen or innocent of crime to claim the right to security and life that your state should not take away from you. In Belarus, the Lukashenka regime has been charged with disappearing mafia kingpins along with opposition leaders, using the same methods, and of course in Russia, some 400 people in missing in the North Caucasus even by official admission. So it's not good wherever it happens and the Tajik government needs to explain what's going on.

Paul Goble covers the exodus of Russians from Tajikistan, a process that has been going on steadily and in large numbers since the civil war. From far-away Brighton Beach, I can anecdotally report that for the first time talking to Russians who work as home attendants or have "khom-atten" that there are Tajiks now reported among the many former Soviets fleeing the region. When there is a Tajik restaurant in New York City, I guess we'll know there is more serious migration. Arkady Dubnov says that Russian language isn't declining because Tajik migrants need it to speak in the near abroad, starting with Russia, where they seek work. And some meet tragic ends, as we are reminded once again just how many return in coffins after being murdered in hate crimes or dying on unsafe construction sites.

Let us think of the most OSCE extreme sports -- the Afghan-Tajik border patrol training in the winter and...the Minsk Group meetings in the summer. OSCE tries the patience of the saints who persist with it. Everyone talks about the porous Tajik border, and a video of a precarious plane flight over it (see link below) lets you know that it's porous, but, well, not so navigable. Even so, there is expected to be trouble after US troops withdraw, and OSCE is at least trying to train some local people to address the challenges. It seems like training for a few dozen people can't make much of a difference, but as the saying goes, it matters to the starfish....

Early on March 15, a 58-year-old man put on his tracksuit and left
home in Qurghonteppa, a 90-minute drive south of Dushanbe, Tajikistan’s
capital. Morning exercise was a regular part of his routine, says
Amnesty International. But on this morning the man, a prominent critic
of President Imomali Rakhmon, did not return.

Friends and political allies fear Salimboy Shamsiddinov was kidnapped
for his political views, including his critique of Tajik-Uzbek
relations. Shamsiddinov, head of the Society of Uzbeks of Khatlon
Province, is no stranger to tough talk, often expressing himself freely
on politics and interethnic relations in a country where questioning the
official line is discouraged, especially in an election year.

«We looked into this theory as well. No kidnapping has taken place. Shamsiddinov has, himself, left the house and disappeared. We’ve received neither information of him having been beaten or forcefully taken out of his home nor any sign of kidnapping and this case must not be interpreted as “political”,» added E. Jalilov.

Global Voices points out that while disappearance of Umarali Quvvatov in Dubai is discussed, nobody seems to care about disappearance of Shamsiddinov within the country:

Over the last ten days, journalists and internet users in Tajikistan have actively discussed the ‘disappearance’ of a Tajik opposition leader
from a Dubai-based detention center. Meanwhile, they have largely
ignored another recent disappearance of an outspoken critic of the
regime within the country itself. Salim Shamsiddinov, 58, has been missing since he left his house in the southern city of Qurghonteppa early in the morning on March 15.

For GV, Quvvatov is tarnished by his association with the fuel business, but not for many Tajiks:

Despite commanding some support, Quvvatov, as a once-successful
businessmen, also has his doubters in the country. Before appearing as
an ardent opponent of Rahmon, Umarali Quvvatov was a successful
entrepreneur, the head and founder of two private companies that
transported oil products to Afghanistan through Tajikistan. Quvvatov
claims that his share in these businesses was taken by force by
Shamsullo Sohibov, the son-in-law of the president.

However, the majority of internet users in Tajikistan seem to support
him. Quvvatov has also attracted some followers due to his religious
views. In one of the interviews that he gave [ru]
to RFE/RL's Tajik service, Quvvatov described himself as a “Sufi”,
practicing the tradition that focuses on the “esoteric” dimension of
Islam. In Tajikistan, Sufis are popularly known as “pure Muslims”, which
partly explains the support for Quvvatov among some religious people.

The ethnic
Russian community in Tajikistan has declined in size from more than 400,000 in
Gorbachev’s time to about 40,000 now, the smallest number of ethnic Russians in
any CIS country except Armenia, a trend that has had a major impact on the
internal life of that Central Asian country and on its relations with Moscow.

But according to Arkady Dubnov, a
Moscow commentator, the situation with regard to Russian language knowledge
there is somewhat better, largely because of the continuing impact of
Soviet-era patterns and the more than 700,000 Tajiks who have gone to work in
the Russian Federation

Each day an average of three Tajiks return from Russia in simple
wooden coffins. They are the victims of racist attacks, police
brutality, dangerous working conditions and unsafe housing.

They go for the money, earning up to four times more in Russia than they would at home – if they were lucky to find a job in in dirt-poor Tajikistan. “They are saving to get married and build a house,” said Rustam Tursunov, deputy mayor of the western town of Tursunzoda.

In 2010, Rustam Khukumov was sentenced to almost 10 years in a
Russian prison, charged, along with three other Tajik nationals, with
possessing nine kilos of heroin.

Khukumov is the son of the powerful head of Tajikistan’s railway
boss, Amonullo Khukumov. The senior Khukumov is an ally and relative of
the Tajik strongman, President Emomali Rakhmon (Khukumov is
father-in-law to Rakhmon’s daughter). Could that have anything to do
with why the Khukumov scion was released early, under murky
circumstances, only a year into his jail term?

For asking that question, the weekly “Imruz News” now owes Khukumov over $10,500 in “moral damages,” a Dushanbe court ruled on February 25. The paper vows to appeal, which means more embarrassing attention on Khukumov.

As EurasiaNet.org's David Trilling (@dtrilling) about this situation, "Look what's just across the porous and poorly secured border from Tajikistan":

For years, Badakhshan Province enjoyed life away from the action, an
island of stability as war engulfed the rest of Afghanistan. But as the
broader conflict winds down, the northeastern province is offering a
bleak view of the future.

That's because NATO last year handed over security duties in Badakhshan
exclusively to the Afghan National Army (ANA) and National Police (ANP),
but the transition has coincided with a spike in violence and increased
militant activity.

Amb. Susan Elliott, our envoy in Dushanbe, is not dancing like our US ambassador to Uzbekistan, George Krol, last year -- she's more serious.

But does this picture, well...sort of say something about US-Tajik relations? It belongs to the Soviet genre of "bread and salt celebration" photos that are an iconic staple for the region's media. But this more impromptu Twitter version can't help evoking a little bit more beyond the rituals. There's that studied indifference to her menial task -- or glassy-eyed boredom? -- of the young woman in front, and the faint half-smile of the one toward the back; and the very faint frown from the ambassador herself, which could be a wince from having to taste some kumys sort of thing -- although that grass looks yummy...

Lest you think women are only pressed into their bread-salt routine, here's a photo of women in Khorog described as "fantastic entrepreneurs" by our ambassador. Of course, it's the usual "women's work" of embroidery or sewing, from the looks of it, but that's a start...

Joining in the worldwide craze, Tajiks have turned in at least four Harlem Shakes: here, by the Tajik Debaters' Society, illustrating that without the props of the rich world, as in other Shakes around the world, the students have been ingenuous with tape and paper and bags; here, sort of a partial Harlem Shake in Tajik national dress; here, which may be the only Harlem Shake performed in chapans by menu.tj; and here, by crazy dudes, which may get the vote for "most minimalist Harlem shake, anywhere".

A village on the Afghan-Tajik border on the banks of the Amu Darya River, 16 October 2008. Photo by Kate Dixon for OSCE.

The OSCE Office in Tajikistan hosted an extracurricular day for 30
Afghan and Tajik students from the faculties of Engineering and Natural
Sciences at universities in Dushanbe. The event is part of an initiative to strengthen co-operation on
hydrology and environment between Afghanistan and Tajikistan in the
Upper Amu-Darya River basin.

Twenty-four officers from of the Tajik Border Troops, Customs Service
and the Interior Ministry worked on evaluating context and potential
risks, identification, analysis and classification of risks, and risk
assessment at airport and land borders. The course was delivered by
serving police and border police officers from Turkey and the former
Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia

Afghan students and their instructors take part in a high-altitude
training exercise in preparation for two weeks of winter training on
survival, mountaineering, search and rescue, avalanche awareness, and
snow analysis in Khoja Obigarm, 50 kilometers north of Dushanbe, 12
February 2013. Photo by Mansur Ziyoev

On the one hand, the working group found that there are no formal
barriers to obtaining key documents or to public access to policy and
regulatory decision-making processes. At the same time, there is no
legal framework to facilitate public scrutiny and involvement, nor
practical mechanisms to place information in the public domain. In
practice, the lack of formal procedures makes meaningful public debate
or oversight of the sector all but impossible.

But because there are a half dozen or so mistakes in the translation that makes me sound like I'm saying the opposite of what I actually said [fortunately fixed within a day!], and because not everybody reads Russian, I'm reprinting the original Russian questions and my answers in English below. I've asked them to make the corrections. I don't mind, because this is an important independent publication and I support its mission. I think they do a good job.

I'm not sure how they came to ask me, a person who is not a formal expert on the region, for such an extensive interview, but they did, perhaps in search of independent analysis.

Although I've spent a career of 35 years in this field where I have travelled extensively throughout Eurasia, and lived and worked in Russia and travelled frequently to Russia, Belarus, Poland in particular for OSCE, I have never been to a single Central Asian country. I worked in the Central Eurasian Program at OSI for six years without such a boon. It's not for any lack of desire; it just so happened that at different times when I was actually invited to go to Kyrgzystan when I worked with various human rights groups, or Kazakhstan when I was a public member at the OSCE, it simply happened that I couldn't go. I doubt I could get a visa to Turkmenistan, having written critically about it for OSI for six years, or Uzbekistan, where I also wrote critically for two years -- and of course before that, I edited two weeklies for RFE/RL and other publications for many years.

Even so, I study the regional Russian-language and English-language press very carefully, go to all the conferences I can, and interview people directly either when they visit the US, or when I see them at international conferences or over email and Skype. That's certainly not a substitute for a personal visit, where you can get the feel of things and have many important one-on-one conversations. But in lack of direct exposure on my skin of the winds of Central Asia, I'm no different than most pundits who have either never been there, or have been there only infrequently, and don't even speak any regional languages.

I do think there's an advantage to having a critical independent view of this critical region. I think those not in formal structures can speak out more loudly about the corrosive effect on human rights that the US and Europe have had; the ongoing pernicious role that Russia plays; and the troublesome future of Chinese domination -- not to mention the ways in which the oppressive autocratic regimes play these factors off against each other to keep themselves in power and their people miserable.

You have nothing to lose if your job does not depend on some certain perspective. I find that the status quo in the human rights movement is to minimize the threat of terror or unrest and play up the awfulness of the regimes. That's a whitewash, given the groups in the region that have many, many more thousands of adherents that Western-style human rights groups -- like Hizb-ut-Tahir.

As for Washington, I find that far from there being the "neo con" belief that a) there is rampant terrorism and a horrible threat of Islamization and/or b) some imminent "Arab Spring" coming, there is actually nothing of the sort. Oh, there's that one paper at Jamestown Foundation or something, but that's it.

That is, those on the left, the "progressives" and the "RealPolitik" adherents constantly pontificate as if there were some horrid neo-cons or hawks or conservatives saying these things, but in fact these groups, which have dwindling influence in any event, either are following RealPolitik themselves or don't even care at all about this region (mainly the latter).

So in my view, there is this whole fake industry of anti-anti commentary, which runs like this:

"There isn't any Islamic threat at all in this region, perish the thought, it's just a poor region with dictators who in fact go overboard suppressing legitimate Muslim activity"

"There's no Muslim fervour in fact, these states are Sovietized and secularized".

"Nothing is going to happen when troops leave, it is all wildly exaggerated and people who say that seem not to realize that the US troops are the conflict generator, not the IMU"

"Russia has little influence any more in this region; it has less gas extraction, it has less money, it has length troop strength and its efforts to make a Warsaw Pact -- the CSTO -- or a Soviet Re-Union with a customs union have mainly failed."

And so on.

While each one of those statements can be true up to a point, they also lead to this strange endorsement of the status quo in these regions that in fact ends up serving the regimes, in my view.

Russia's influence is considerable, and it has been behind unrest by its action (as it was in Bakiyev's ouster and its threats to Atambayev) or inaction (with the pogroms in Osh). The remittance economies are huge -- for the labour migrants from Tajikistan in particular, but increasingly Uzbekistan and even Turkmenistan. That means that Russia winds up dominating the lives of these countries through some of their most vulnerable citizens -- not just the mainly male workers but the females left back home as head of households with children. The Russian language did not disappear from this region, even if it is taught less, because dominating Russian mainstream media, and Russian-controlled social media like mail.ru and Vkontakte, are very big factors in the media space in this region.

As for terrorism, sure, it gets exaggerated and the regimes "do it to themselves". But there are also real terrorist acts that occur. There is a sense that the presence of US troops in Afghanistan has ensured a kind of "frozen conflict" in this region that isn't on the official list of the frozen conflicts. The IMU has been tied up mainly fighting NATO troops. So when they go away, then what? Where do they go, those 5000 or 8000 or however many fighters there are? (And probably there are analysts saying they are only 2000, but who really knows, what, you did a door-to-door survey, guys?) Will they peacefully melt back into the countryside and farm happily? Or what? I think it's okay to look at that question critically without being branded as a terrorism hysteric.

Ditto the question of "Arab Spring". No one thinks there is any Arab Spring coming to Central Asia. I don't know of a single pundit or analyst saying this. Yet again, there is the "anti-anti-" industry making this claim, mainly from the Registan gang. The problem is that when you adopt that scornful skepticism, you stop seeing reality when it appears. As Paul Goble put it, there is a way in which talking about the Arab Spring is a little spring in itself. And there are signs of unrest here and there, and you don't know how they will turn out.

Remember, the same gang at Registan -- Sarah Kendzior and Katy Pearce -- were predicting with firm determination that discussion of oppression on the Internet was causing a chill in use, a decline in use, and even the shuttering of popular discussion pages. They implied that there would never be any Twitter revolution in Azerbaijan, that it was going to be slow and incremental and we shouldn't artificially speed it up by over-amplifying human rights cases.

Yet thousands of people keep demonstrating in Azerbaijan despite the news of repression, and they keep using Internet tools to make their case -- tools that Pearce is now blithely measuring with machinopology as if she had never written that Internet use would be chilled by such expression. It hasn't been. Facebook membership boomed. Will this "spring" last forever? I truly doubt it. Not with potential European and American oil interests -- and actually existing Russian and Iranian oil interests -- in this mix. Everybody will blame the West for the crackdown in Azerbaijan that is likely to be inevitable and thorough, and fume at the regime-tropic USAID grantees that they ignored last year (or even cooperated with) as the smoking gun of American perfidy. But it will be Russia's money and military role that will be the bigger factor.

This is how I'm seeing it, in the end: To the extent Russian wants or needs conflict, or is weakened and can't efficiently prevent or manage conflict, there will be conflict in Central Asia after NATO troops are withdrawn.

Part of that resistance to Russian state intrusion will be Islamic ferment. If analysts were busy telling everyone these were secular Soviet states and Arab Spring can't happen, they will be uncomfortably confronted with the reality that Islam is a great organizing tool in countries where it has historic roots, and this need not be seen as a threat to the West. Yet because they've been engaged in such an industry telling us it's not a threat to the West, they will be embarrassed when in fact it will be -- as they emblematically were when the Egyptian woman activist just feted at the State Department turned out to be such an anti-American hater, 9/11 celebrator, and horrid anti-semite on Twitter, and not because she was hacked -- a fiction State had to indulge in to save face.

02/25/2013

So here we have it now (distributed today), so we don't just have to listen to Russian analyst speculation or my newsletter, we can hear it from the Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia himself, in answer to some journalists in Dushanbe:

No, the US will not use Tajikistan as its backyard or a doormat on its way out of Afghanistan.

But really, the next questions for the journalists to have asked, if they had had an opportunity before the Assistant Secretary was whisked away on the tarmac, would be something like these:

o But is the US training special ops teams or intelligence-related personnel or troops so that we have a close working relationship with the oppressive government of Tajikistan regarding post-withdrawal Afghanistan?

o But just how many US troops and advisers will remain in Tajikistan, and will this number grow, and will there be any kind of informal cooperation with the abusive government of Tajikistan around something like Ayni or any other location?

o But does the US feel that it is constrained by the presence of Russian troops and Russian plans/intentions regarding Tajikistan?

o Say, why *won't* the operation take place through Tajikistan, but takes place through Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and of course Russia (60% of the NDN chokehold is in Russia)? Is life about choices among Eurasian tyrants or are there logistical issues with road or rail conditions or something?

o Could you be more specific then, if you aren't literally going to run the US troops backward out of Tajikistan, and you aren't going to literally help Tajikistan through the base in Ayni, what *will* you will be doing militarily in terms of helping the authoritarian government of Tajikistan to have stability?

Robert O. Blake, Jr.Assistant Secretary, Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs

Palace of Nations

Dushanbe, Tajikistan

February 20, 2013

Assistant Secretary Blake:
Well good evening everyone. I’ve just concluded a very productive
meeting with his Excellency President Rahmon. I had the opportunity to
thank President Rahmon for his very strong support of stabilization
efforts in Afghanistan and for his strong support of the U.S. and
international coalition efforts in Afghanistan. We discussed how we can
continue to strengthen our cooperation in the areas of border security,
counterterrorism, and counternarcotics. I congratulated President Rahmon
on the progress that Tajikistan has made in its efforts to join the
World Trade Organization that will occur very soon and I remarked that
this will be an important step in facilitating trade and regional
integration in this region. We also discussed the importance of free,
transparent and fair elections in the elections that will take place in
November; as well as the importance of allowing space for
nongovernmental organizations, for journalists, and for other members of
civil society. I will be giving a press conference tomorrow but I’ll be
glad to take one or two questions now.

Question: Did you have a chance to discuss with the President,
issues related to military cooperation, in particular, using the
territory of Tajikistan for transportation of some cargo for
Afghanistan, for some joint cooperation there? Did you discuss issues of
the use of one of our airports in the remote region of Ayni for the use
of military operations and for the purposes of military cooperation
with Afghanistan?

Assistant Secretary Blake: No, we didn’t discuss any use of
any Tajik airport either now or in the future but we did discuss, in
general, our cooperation on Afghanistan and again particularly the
importance of continuing to strengthen our cooperation in the areas of
border security and counternarcotics and counterterrorism particularly
now that this very important transition in Afghanistan is beginning.
I’ll take one more question.

Question [BBC/Tajikistan]: Does the U.S. government have an
intention to withdraw its troops very soon through the territory of
Tajikistan and if yes, how will Tajikistan benefit from it?

Assistant Secretary Blake: No, as you all know, the President
of the United States announced during his State of the Union speech that
the United States would be halving the number of troops in Afghanistan
by February of next year, but I don’t expect that that operation will
take place through Tajikistan. But nonetheless I do want to express our
support for Tajikistan’s efforts to help the stabilization for
Afghanistan and we very much count on those efforts continuing. And
again, I’ll be glad to take your questions tomorrow. Thank you very
much.

02/24/2013

This is my little blog on Tajikistan that comes out on Saturdays. I was travelling abroad and working on a project this last month so I missed two weeks, but I hope to be back on track. If you are reading this on TinyLetter you will have to come to my blog Different Stans for the links in RU and TJ as these are blocked by this mail system. Write me at catfitzny@yahoo.com with comments or requests to be added to the mailing list.

HEADLINES

o US Secretary of State Visits Tajikistan

o Tajik President Calls on Army to Resist External Threats

o Journalist Stabbing a Warning for Tajik Opposition

COMMENTARY

Assistant Secretary of State Robert O. Blake, Jr. visited Dushanbe February 20-21 and met with President Emomali Rahmon. There is nothing on the US Embassy Dushanbe web site (yet) about this meeting, and only a picture on the Embassy Facebook page; very little anywhere else.

The independent Tajik press reported an alleged offer to make Tajikistan available for NATO equipment withdrawals, but the official did not seem very high level and later the same press reported just on the English-language page reported "Washington reprotedly does not plan to use Tajikistan’s infrastructure
during the withdrawal of its troops from Afghanistan." So the US seemed to be saying "thanks but no thanks". Too mountainous?

Into this vacuum of information steps a Russian analyst as usual, speculating that the purpose of Blake's trip was to shore up commitments from Dushanbe to let US and NATO military "obyekty" (installations) stay on the territory of Tajikistan. It's interesting that he doesn't say "troops," although there are some US "troops" in Tajikistan doing training and advising. He talks about the "obyekty" (facilities) which in a sense are what the US is already helping with by donating equipment.

The Russian analyst Anatoly Knyazev from the Institute for Oriental Studies believes the US will bribe officials and support a "thin layer" of students and nationalist intellectuals ("thin layer" is old Soviet Pravda parlance for a discredited social class not according to the Marxist-Leninist plan). This "thin layer" - the Oreo cookie filling smushed between Russia and the US and ready to be dipped into the milk of China (so I'm visualizing vividly now) is not really going to be allowed to succeed, as the US won't fund them, but they will be used to put pressure on Rahmon. Mkay.

Meanwhile, USAID is busy funding comic books in the Tajik language, so I don't think anyone's going to be colouring outside the lines...

Note that in the US photo op, Rahmon is smiling and the chandelier is featured. Note that in the Tajik photo op Rahmon is frowning and the wallpaper is featured. Also, note that the flower display at these things are always done beautifully.

The Tajik military parade last week provided an opportunity for Dushanbe to show off their hardware including some still-shiny Chaikas. Haven't seen those in awhile.

The trial of the suspect in the killing of the security official in Badakhshan last year has opened, and surprise, surprise, it's behind closed doors.

There was a bit of a kerfluffle with an Iranian presidential candidate speaking of a "Greater Iran" and Iran "taking back" Tajikistan, Armenian and Azerbaijan, but...well, when we saw the phrase "presidential candidate" we knew that this story couldn't be true, because those things are real in the Iranian dictatorship. Anyway, Ahmadineajad is coming to Dushanbe for the spring festival of Novruz in a few weeks and surely they'll sort things out. Meanwhile, we learn from RFE/RL and @eTajikistan that 29% of the 2000 plus foreign students in Tajikistan come from Iran.

U.S. Assistant Secretary for South and
Central Asian Affairs Robert Blake has called on Tajikistan's leadership
to hold a fair, democratic, and transparent presidential election in
November.

Blake started his two-day visit to Dushanbe on February 20 and has met with NGO representatives and civil-society activists.

No doubt this meeting had more people in it than Blake's meeting in Turkmenistan.

Assistant
Secretary of State for Central and South Asia Robert O. Blake, Jr. and
President Emomali Rahmon of Tajikistan, February 20, 2013. Photo by President.tj.

President.tj reports:

It was emphasized that the US continues to provide support to
Tajikistan's initiatives to intensify its struggle with terrorism,
extremism, unlawful narcotics trade, and to further assist in the
strengthening of the defense of the state borders with Afghanistan, and
material and technical provision of the relevant state agencies.

DUSHANBE, February 14, 2013, Asia-Plus -- Tajik Ambassador to the
United States, Nouriddin Shamsov, has called on Washington to remove
Tajikistan from Jackson-Vanik restrictions.

According to Silk Road Newsline, Ambassador Shamsov has noted that
Tajik economy shows steady progress, the country will officially join
the WTO on March 2, 20012 and it’s time for the United States to
graduate Tajikistan from the restrictive Jackson-Vanik amendment.

“My government anticipates continuing effective bilateral cooperation
with U.S. Government to lift as soon as possible the Jackson-Vanik
amendment which would impede as we do believe full fledged membership of
Tajikistan in the WTO and further promotion of bilateral trade and
investment relations with the Unites States of America,” Shamsov told a
panel on the WTO at the at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute (CACI) in
Washington on February 13.

Tajikistan is ready to offer its territory for transit of freight by
international allied forces in Afghanistan, and there are no obstalces
regarding this issue. Davlat Nazriev, head of the Agency for
Information, Press Analysis and Foreign Policy Planning of the Foreign
Affairs of Tajikistan announced at a briefing.

"In the event of an appeal from any country, this question will be reviewed through the established procedures," he emphasized.

The purpose of Robert Blake's visit to Dushanbe is to obtain a final decision on the issue of deploying American and NATO military facilities on the territory of Tajikistan, since the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan has already begun, and the US immediately demands hard guarantees, says Aleksandr Knyazev, coordinator of regiona programs for the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Seciences, regnum.ru reported February 20.

In the expert's opinion, "It is still not too late for Russia to stop this process, otherwise before the end of this year, another process may be initiated regarding the withdrawal of the Russian military base from Tajikistan. Evidently the US is placing its bets on Rahmon according to the principle, 'he's a bastard but our bastard," and it's understandable that they are absolutely indifferent to the nation of this regime when it's a question of the strategic plans for deploying part of the troops withdrawn from Afghanistan in the countries of the region."

Knyazev sees the situation crudely -- bribes to key officials, and support for a "thin layer of Westernized youth" and some of the intelligentsia that are "nationalist-minded" and see the West as "the lesser of two evils". This "layer" will activate "numerous Western NGOs for 'colour scenarios', not to really bring them about but as "a lever of pressure on Rahmon".

The United States Embassy in Dushanbe, Export Control and Related
Border Security program (EXBS) and Office of Military Cooperation (OMC)
provided twenty-two All - Terrain Vehicles (ATV’s), thirty-three light
trucks and additional tactical equipment to the Government of
Tajikistan. The ATV’s will be distributed to border posts throughout
Tajikistan to assist Border Guard units in their efforts to combat
contraband from entering and transiting the country. The light trucks
and tactical equipment will similarly benefit Border Guard detachments,
outposts, and units, increasing their capacity for securing the Tajik
border from external threats.

Deputy Chief of Mission, Sarah Penhune participated in a donation
ceremony at the Border Guard Facility in Dushanbe. Ms. Penhune
remarked, “The United States Government shares the goals of the
Government of Tajikistan to combat the threat of contraband and drug
trafficking and recognizes that keeping Tajikistan’s borders secure is a
national priority. The Border Guards are the first line of defense for
Tajikistan from external threats, and they are frequently required to
carry out this important work with limited resources, in very difficult
terrain, and often during very challenging weather conditions. The U.
S. Embassy EXBS and OMC programs are pleased to assist the Border Guard
in their efforts to combat the threat of contraband and drug
trafficking.”

At a meeting to honour the 20th anniversary of Tajikistan's Armed Forces, the president called on the military and law-enforcement agencies to take into account growing "threats of modernity" such as terrorism, extremism and narcotics, regnum. ru and president.tj reported.

"I have noted many times and emphasize once again that security the security of the state and nation, protecting civilian life and the socio-economic development of the country directly depends on the political situation, law and order, guarantee of the rule of law, combatting crime and protecting our boarders," the news agency Avesta reported, citing the president.

A Russian human rights activist who has worked closely with Sattori suggests
[ru] that the assault on Sattori was a “political order,” and that the
journalist was punished for his ties with Quvvatov and his recent
attempts to mobilize international pressure in order to prevent the
politician's extradition to Tajikistan. It is unclear what the
journalist himself makes of the attack. In his interview with Radio
Ozodi, Sattori said [ru] he did not know whom to blame for an apparent attempt on his life. A bit later, however, he told [ru] BBC he knew who was behind the attack, suggesting also that this was a powerful person within the Tajik government.

A court in Ukraine has ruled that former Tajik Prime Minister Abdumalik
Abdullojonov can be held in detention for up to 40 days while
authorities await documents from Dushanbe regarding his possible
extradition.

Abdullojonov was arrested on February 5 at Boryspil Airport near Kyiv on
an international warrant after arriving from the United States.

Tajikistan's Foreign Ministry has made an official announcementi n which it has condemned the statement by Ayatollah Said Muhammad Bokiri Harrozi, a presidential candidate, that in the event that he becomes president of Iran, then Tajikistan, Armenia and Azerbaijan will be returned to Iran, news.tj reported.

"They support democratic transitions in 'Kyrzakhstan' and Georgia,
mindful from our own experience that it takes a long time to get
democracy right, and that it rarely happens right away.”

In a telephone conversation Kerry also thanked Kazakhstan for agreeing to hold talks on Iran's nukes.

State.gov's transcript has it correctly as "Kyrgyzstan". But at about 30:14 or so on the video tape, you can hear Kerry make a slight muff of the name of this Central Asian country. Even so, the overall message in support of democracy, lest anyone think only the neo-cons will carry this torch, is clear:

We value human rights, and we need to tell the story of America’s
good work there, too. We know that the most effective way to promote the
universal rights of all people, rights and religious freedom, is not
from the podium, not from either end of Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s from
the front lines – wherever freedom and basic human dignity are denied.
And that’s what Tim Kaine understood when he went to Honduras.

The brave employees of State and USAID – and the Diplomatic Security
personnel who protect the civilians serving us overseas – work in some
of the most dangerous places on Earth, and they do it fully cognizant
that we share stronger partnerships with countries that share our
commitment to democratic values and human rights. They fight corruption
in Nigeria. They support the rule of law in Burma. They support
democratic institutions in Kyrgyzstan and Georgia, mindful from our own
experience that it takes a long time to get democracy right, and that it
rarely happens right away.

In the end, all of those efforts, all of that danger and risk that
they take, makes us more secure. And we do value democracy, just as
you’ve demonstrated here at UVA through the Presidential Precinct
program that’s training leaders in emerging democracies.

01/27/2013

This is my little newsletter on Tajikistan that comes out once a
week on Saturdays. If you want to see past issues, look to the column on
the right down below for the key word "Tajikistan". If you want to get this in
your email or you have comments or contributions, write
catfitzny@yahoo.com

As I've seen New Realist Eurasia Foundation Young Pro, Kerry think-tanker and long-time defense analyst Joshua Foust of Registan trash Zenn before when he reported factually on terrorists in Kazakhstan, I take it all with a grain of salt. I have no separate information. I have only questions. Zenn says:

The Southeast Asian militants who returned to their home countries after
the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan carried out or trained others to
carry out terrorist attacks, which killed hundreds of people, but, they
proved much less effective at generating change than the mass social
movements in the Arab World in 2011. As long as the populations of
Central Asian countries remain vigilant to the threat posed by these
militant groups, the fighters returning from Afghanistan will likely be
able to only carry out sporadic attacks but gain no traction in society.
However, crises like the ethnic riots in Urumqi in 2009, the ethnic
clashes in Osh in 2010, the deadly Zhanaozen protests in 2011, and the
instability in Tajikistan’s Gorno-Badakshan in 2012, all have the
potential to erode government legitimacy, while increasing support for
alternatives to the present leadership. Most alternatives come in the
form of opposition parties, but some of those who have been aggrieved
may turn toward groups like the TIP, Jund al-Khilafah and the IMU
instead.

Everything about this statement seems prudent; it doesn't overstate the case -- if anything it points out that the last time this happened after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, it didn't amount to much. Of course, that was before the Internet.

Defense consultant Nathan Hamm is scornful:

Whether or not terror groups are likely to be more active in Central
Asia after NATO withdraws from Afghanistan is a useful thing to think
about, but it is vital not to overhype the risks. The governments of the
region are phenomenally imaginative at devising and hyping threats to
justify not only repressive domestic policies but to extract concessions
from Western governments in the forms of financial assistance and
tempered criticism of their human rights abuses. Assessments of the risk
of terrorism need to capture the scale and timeline for the risk. Zenn
is correct that there is a risk of the “return” of Central Asian terror
groups at some unspecified point in the future. However, Central Asian
security services have shown more than sufficient capability to monitor
and disrupt terror groups. Furthermore, as grim as it is to point out,
Afghanistan and Pakistan will continue to be much more permissible and
target-rich environments for all of these groups.

Both of them seem to think these governments will remain strong, although they face rattling as Karimov in Uzbekistan is going to have a succession and Rahmon in Tajikistan will have "elections" and there could always be another toppling in Kyrgyzstan.

In any event, for the purposes of this newsletter, the Tajik situation might not be so much "returning warriors" as opportunistic kinsmen or brotherly fighters seeing an opening. We don't know how it's going to turn out. Sure, Afghanistan and Pakistan will always be worse; maybe even Pakistan more than Afghanistan. But that doesn't mean the post-Soviet stans will be quiet. What would be more advantageous, staying in a place where the Taliban and related allies no longer need you and you have no unifying factor with them to fight NATO/the US? Or returning to your own country or travelling to neighbouring kin in order to use your acquired battle skills?

Nate Schenkken said on Twitter that Islamist terror from returning warriors should be on the list of concerns, but only under something like drug lords; he blames them for the pogroms in Kyrgyzstan. There's nothing to say that the two things can't coexist in one gang, however.

A fire ripped through a new Moscow building’s underground parking lot
on Saturday, killing 10 migrant workers and injuring 13 others who had
been working and living there, city police said.

All those who died were citizens of Tajikistan, Moscow police
said in a statement. It said they were killed after a garbage heap on
the floor they were working on caught fire, but the cause of the blaze
itself was under investigation.

The IMF in its report of last year wrote that around US $3.5 billion from Tajikistan was deposited in offshore accounts. Zafar Abdulloev, a Tajik journalist researching economic issues, claims that the entities from Tajikistan with offshore accounts are: Talco, the aluminum factory; Innovative Road Solutions or IRS, and companies belong to the Tajik businessman Hasan Asadullozoda, brother-in-law of President Emomali Rahmon.

Ali Ironpour,
a member of the agriculture committee of the Iranian parliament, says that
Tehran can solve the problems of drought in eastern Iran by purchasing some one
billion cubic meters of water from neighboring Tajikistan, a step he says the
two governments agreed to in May 2012.

Russia and Tajikistan have come to an agreement on one of the sticking points
in their deal to extend the lease of Russia's largest military base in
Central Asia, reports Tajikistan's minister of energy and industry Gul
Sherali. As part of that deal, Russia agreed to duty-free fuel shipments
to Tajikistan, but wanted a guarantee that the discounted fuel wouldn't
be reexported. Tajikistan had objected, but now has agreed to Moscow's terms.

And...Russian troops and Tajik border guards are really, really going to be able to check on 1m tonnes of oil products and make sure they never, ever get re-sold anywhere else, Scout's honour?

Moscow insists on the clause because of the high level of fuel smuggling
in south Central Asia and the risk of fuel delivered to Tajikistan
being sold on to third countries such as Afghanistan. Dushanbe had
previously objected to the clause, with Tajik officials saying they
would be unable to guarantee that gasoline from Russia will not be
re-exported.

Trilling thinks Tajikistan has no leverage. True enough, but it has something else -- continued non-compliance and pleading the inability to monitor all those mountain roads not even demarcated. This is an regular ritual...

Tajikistan’s ever-more-ridiculous elections
exercise will end predictably, as we all wonder how far Emomali Rakhmon
can push his authority over economic and political life of the
ostensibly conflict-averse population. Who among us has not thought that
this was the year that the country would implode, divide into ungovernable de facto criminal states, and drag the whole region in. He’s gone ‘too far’ with the IRPT, HT, Pamiri clans, Turajonzoda’s clan, or myriad other rivals to maintain his power base. But, it has not happened yet, somehow, so we stop predicting it.

I agree. We were endlessly hearing how that overcrowded teeming Ferghana Valley was going to explode, too, but then the state managed to sterilize the women and suppress the demonstrations and keep the lights dim...

Tajikistan is a transit point for one of the most lucrative drugs routes
in the world. Illegal drugs from neighbouring Afghanistan flood into
the country on their way to Russia and Western Europe.

Rustam Qobil travels to remote border villages in Tajikistan to find out how communities are being affected by the drugs trade.

INL’s “Sport Against Drugs” campaign, Dushanbe, Tajikistan, February 19, 2012. International Narcotics and Law
Enforcement (INL) section of the U.S. Embassy and local partner NGO
National Olympic Academy (NOA) organized an anti-drug dance competition
titled “Jam Master” at the Spartak Youth Center in Dushanbe on February
19, 2012.

***

Check out my Pinterest -- I want someone to bring me this in the cold of New York City right now like in the cold of these Tajik mountains.

01/19/2013

This is my little blog about Tajikistan that comes out on Saturdays. I had a three-week hiatus during the region's holidays, which I call "The Land of the Eternal Yolka," and my own holidays, which were actually a chance to get some big work projects done. If you want to read past issues, click on "Tajikistan" under the categories. If you have comments leave them here or write me at catfitzny@yahoo.com where you can also get on the list to get this newsletter via email.

COMMENTS

Here we go again with the on-again, off-again social media website closures in Tajikistan which have been going on for months and which I've reported on in all my past issues.

What is the purpose of these shenanigans? Not really to shut down the sites, which likely make money for somebody, and likely related to the president and his family somewhere. It's just to let them know that "they can if they want," and they are in charge here. Post your LolCats if you will, people, but we can pull them on you at any time, for no any reason, or no reason. (Actually, they are a lot like the TOS of most of these services in that respect, because they can ban you arbitrarily at will for any reason or no reason, too!)

What's more important than whether or not these Western sites get blocked -- although they are still significant and an important outlet for some -- is how the internal sites like Asia Plus fare, and what the government or its proxies are doing to control the domestic media.

Despite the foreign minister's claim that he would get 80% of the population on the Internet, the government is going slow and keeping a tight rein on the web. And the Muslim authorities are also letting journalists know they are watching. The Council of Ulems, which is basically an arm of the state as Forum 18's Igor Rotar has explained, recently issued a statement saying that fatwahs were not to be recognized if issued from various unofficial groups. Well, at first that might seem like welcome news, if the official Islamic Council tells people that fatwahs are not going to be recognized. But all they mean is that they themselves get to be the only ones in the fatwah business.

The journalists' community is not sitting back on their hands when they hear this sort of thing; Nuriddin Karshibayev, head of the National Association of Independent Media of Tajikistan said this was a mere "recommendation" and that in any event, a fatwah "is not a lawful demand, and looks like interference in the professional activity of a journalist , which is an act punishable under criminal law". Well, good luck with that, as a state-approved and state-controlled entity like the Council of Ulems may be viewed as making "lawful demands" by the regime when it tells TV and radio "not to corrupt youth" and so on. It's obviously a tug of war. I don't know why Karshibayev said, "If the Council of Ulems believes our journalist do not know how to write materials on religious themes, please, let us organize trainings and teach them". Good Lord, that's giving them too much, as you don't want this state religious council in the business of "training" journalists. That must be merely a rhetorial device to call them out (I hope).

Here's a good article from 2010 which explains why people even turn to Islamic authorities and want to get their fatwahs in the first place: they want some authority to deal with problems that the state can't or won't address, and they want in particular a moral leader to resolve their problems like divorce and division of property. These are people's customs and heritage and they want to turn to them as the secular Soviet and post-Soviet governments aren't helpful. The question is whether these customs, as they become more enhanced, and as the government also exploits people's need for them, become either a toehold for extremism or another conveyor belt for state control or both simultaneously. Certainly the effort to close down two stores that had build informal mosques on their premises lets us know that the state doesn't like freelancing on religion and is ready to invoke both building codes and religious law to accomplish this task.

The US military is in Tajikistan. What do they do all day, as they wait for the seams to burst on their handiwork in Afghanistan next door after 2014? Well, they are trying to make "infrastructure" in keeping with the Obama Administration's notion, developed under Hillary Clinton and likely to be continued under John Kerry, of a "New Silk Road" that will replace the ground lines of communication (G-LOC) in the Northern Distribution Network with arteries for business and trade.

In Tajikistan, the Seabees are helping the Stroibat. Oh, the Stroibat! Remember them from the Soviet era? That was the division of the Soviet Red Army where a lot of hapless recruits were put to work building roads -- and still are. As I'm getting the impression from some history, it seems the tsar, then the commissars would tend to put Central Asians into the stroibat instead of combat units because they weren't sure they'd stay loyal to the cause.

Since World War II, the Seabees have been building roads, airstrips, and buildings in various locales all over the world, sometimes in support of a specific military objective, as during World War II, but other times to help improve the infrastructure of a developing country.

So the American stroibat, if you will, is very much central to the notion of the New Silk Road.

In Tajkistan, as you can read below, and see all the pictures, the work has involved training their "counterparts". Except, like a lot of things in this business, they aren't really counterparts. The Navy Seabees are voluntary recruits, and they come from a country where there is a rich and developed private sector in construction, and other competing branches even of civilian construction for disasters like FEMA, not to mention the Army Corps of Engineers. And even if you look at things like the Roosevelt era and the WPA and the roads and national parks construction, the American state hasn't used the metaphor of "building socialism" in the same way as the Soviet and post-Soviet states have, literally mobilizing workers forcefully into the army, or on volunteer subbotniks and such, to get large construction projects done.

On balance, it's probably a good thing that these mid-Western kids in the US Navy are teaching the Tajik Stroibat things like how to put in shims on cross-beams.

But are they displacing what in fact could be better established in the private sector or civilian sector, rather than strengthening the Soviet-style Stroibat? I wonder. To be sure, our Seabees are going to great lengths to "strengthen the local economy," as they put it, buying their construction materials in nearby markets. Those markets might depend on the good will of some state or even religious potentate in that area; there really isn't a "free market" in the American sense.

Of such mismatches of seeming counterparts, history is made. Will the New Silk Road get built with a series of these kinds of shims, stuck into whatever seeming counterpart they can find hastily before 2015? Look down at the end to see how much money we spend on Tajikistan: a pittance -- $45 million for this last year for the non-military projects. So, maybe it's a good thing that building is getting done out of the military budget?

The military gets in where private business may still fear to tread. Maplecroft cautions against investment in these corrupt and unstable countries. Okay, well I do wonder this: how is that Tajik engineer who headed up the British gold company Oxus' efforts in Uzbekistan, who got jailed when the Uzbek government seized their assets? Eventually, this company stopped complaining publicly. Maybe they made a settlement. What happened to the engineer, Said Ashurov? It seems he is still serving a 12-year sentence for "espionage" while those with foreign passports headed for the exits.

* Tajik Government Still Messing Around with Social Media Sites

* Religious Council: No Fatwahs! Or Rather, Just Our Fatwahs, Please!

* American Stroibat Helps Tajik Stroibat - and So the New Silk Road...

The Facebook social network and RFE/RL's website in Tajik are inaccessible in Tajikistan again.

Asomuddin Atoev, the chairman of Tajikistan's Association of Internet
Service Providers, told RFE/RL that Tajikistan's leading Internet
service providers received SMS instructions from the government's
Communications Service requesting the sites be blocked.

However, the service's chief, Beg Zuhurov, told RFE/RL that his service had not given any instructions to block the sites.

Something strange happened in Tajikistan over a late December
weekend. On a Friday evening, the government’s communications agency
ordered Internet service providers (ISPs) to block 131 websites for
“technical” reasons. Then suddenly, a few days later, the ISPs were
told, in effect; ‘never mind.’

* * *

“Instead of creating a favorable environment for further development of
Tajik IT enterprises, and ensuring their access to foreign markets, the
regulator creates preposterous impediments,” said Asomiddin Atoev, the
chairman of the Association of Internet Providers. “Tajikistan recently joined the World Trade Organization.
The authorities simply do not realize the responsibility imposed by
many WTO provisions. In particular, these include the creation of a
favorable business environment, including in the IT sector, the creative
industry, and [protection of] intellectual property,” Atoev added.

(Summary translation) Theologians at the Islamic Center of Tajikistan recommend media leaders and officials of the government's Committee on Religious Affairs to refrain from giving out fatwahs (in Islam, this is an explanation of a certain problem of a religious and legal nature, and also an answer to a question of a religious nature, which a competent person provides).

"A fatwah can be giving exclusively by the ulems of the Islamic Center and our doors are open to all citizens of the country," says the appeal, which was passed at a meeting of the Council of Ulems [Theologians] of the Islamic Center of Tajikistan and distributed January 19."

"A democratic state gives the right to all people to express their opinion but in all developed countries, democracy is limited by the frameworks of the law. It is hard to imagine what would happen with our society if individual groupings, for the sake of their own interests, would interpret the canons of shariah in their own way," says the statement.

Nuriddin Karshibayev, head of the National Association of Independent Media of Tajikistan, has told Asia Plus that the ulems announcment is only a "recommendation" because the Constitution prohibits censorship.

"If the Council of Ulems believes our journalist do not know how to write materials on religious themes, please, let us organize trainings and teach them. But getting a fatwah, forgive me, that's not a lawful demand, and looks like interference in the professional activity of a journalist , which is an act punished under criminal law."

Muminabad has a population of 13,000 with 4 mosques; there are a total of 51 in the whole region.

In the village of Muminabad (see some good pictures here), in the administrative center of Muminabad district of the Khatlon region, the owners of two private stores unlawfully tried to adapt them as mosques.

Sharif Abdylkhamidov, head of the Qulyab regional department of religious affairs, said authorities blocked the store owner on Tursunzade Street in Muminabad who had put in a separate entrance and turned the second floor of the store into a mosque.

The Tajik foreign minister has officially asked Russian authorities to
provide Dushanbe with historical documents related to borders between
former Soviet republics in Central Asia.

Hamrohon Zarifi told journalists on January 17 that the documents are
needed to clarify Tajikistan's borders with neighboring Uzbekistan and
Kyrgyzstan in order to prevent problems like those experienced in
Uzbekistan's Sokh district.

The presidents of Tajikistan and Russia signed an agreement
in October to extend the presence of the Russian military base in
Tajikistan for another 30 years. But Tajikistan is dragging its feet on
the ratification of the deal, waiting first for Russia to carry out its
part of the deal, to supply duty-free petroleum products and to loosen
restrictions on labor migrants, according to a report
in the Russian newspaper Kommersant. The Kremlin wanted all of these
issues to be dealt with all at the same time, and Russian foreign
minister Sergey Lavrov just finished a visit to Dushanbe, where he attempted to iron out these issues.

Investors operating in three post-Soviet Central Asian republics face
an “extreme risk” of having their businesses expropriated, according to
a survey released last week in the UK.

Maplecroft, a Bath-based political risk consultancy, said on January 9
that it had found plenty of reasons to be wary of the business climate
in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan after “evaluating the risk to
business from discriminatory acts by the government that reduces
ownership, control or rights of private investments either gradually or
as a result of a single action.” Recent fits of resource nationalism in
Kyrgyzstan -- where the Kumtor gold mine,
operated by Toronto-based Centerra Gold, accounted for 12 percent of
GDP in 2011 and more than half the country’s industrial output – and
rampant authoritarianism in places like Tajikistan and Turkmenistan have
led Maplecroft to rank these countries among the most risky in the
world.

Ever since Rustam Emomali (the eldest son of the president of Tajikistan) began working at the Customs Agency, this service has obtained good results. This was stated today at a press conference by Nemat Rahmatov, first deputy of the Customs Service of the government of Tajikistan.

"Only in the course of the last year, 88 million somoni were sent to the country's budget by preventing contrabrand of goods. We are proud that the son of the head of state works in our agency, and we hope Rustam Emomali will continue his activity in the customs service," said Rahmatov.

Seabees assigned to Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 133 work with
the Tajik Army to rebuild, restore and remodel various buildings on
Shamsi Military Base in Tajikistan. NMCB 133 is deployed with Commander,
Task Group 56.2, promoting maritime security operations and theater
security cooperation efforts in the U.S. 5th Fleet area of
responsibility. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd
Class Derek R. Sanchez/Released)

U.S. Navy Seabees assigned to Naval Mobile Construction Battalion (NMCB)
133 deployed to Dushanbe, Tajikistan, in November as part of a Global
Peace Operations Initiative (GPOI), the first Seabee mission in
Tajikistan.

In support of the Office of Military Cooperation (OMC) and Tajikistan
Ministry of Defense (MOD), the Seabee crew began construction alongside
the MOD's construction force, the Stroibat, on phase one of a $1 million
project at the Peace Support Operation Training Center (PSOTC) at
Shamsi Base, funded by GPOI.

To help boost the local economy and establish lasting relationships with
contractors and vendors, the building materials were procured in nearby
street vendor markets by Utilitiesman 1st Class Justin Walker, the
Seabee project supervisor, and Air Force contracting officer, 1st Lt.
Sunset Lo. The vendors delivered the materials in a timely manner,
enabling the project to move forward on schedule.

A car with US Embassy license plates (004 D 055) in Dushanbe was involved in a hit-in-run accident which killed Loik Sharali on December 29, 2012, Asia Plus reports. Police are investigating, and the US Embassy says they are cooperating.

Lots of "Yankee Go Home" in the comments there, and recollections of how the US disregarded diplomatic immunity for a Georgian diplomat who killed a girl in an accident in the US.

The 15 coaches including a restaurant car were ordered from Ukrainian
manufacturer Kriukov Car Building Works. Similar to vehicles previously
supplied to Kazakhstan, they are designed for use in temperatures
between -45°C and 40°C and are to be deployed on Dushanbe - Moscow
services.

The United States has been Tajikistan's largest bilateral donor, budgeting $988.57 million of aid for Tajikistan (FREEDOM support Act and agency budgets) over the period from fiscal year 1992 through fiscal year 2010, mainly for food and other hunmanitarian needs. Budgeted assistance for FY2011 was $44.48 million, and estimated assistance for FY2012 was $45.02 million. The Administration requested $37.41 million in foreign assistance for Tajikistan in FY2013 (these FY2011-FY2013 figures exclude most Defense and Energy Department programs).

12/22/2012

This is my little newsletter on Tajikistan that comes out once a
week on Saturdays. If you want to see past issues, look to the column on
the right down below for the key word "Tajikistan". If you want to get this in
your email or you have comments or contributions, write
catfitzny@yahoo.com

o Could You Ever Turn an Anodyne Development Job in Dushanbe into Anything Real?

o Will Tajikistan Really Become Like Yemen, Guys?

COMMENTS:

Oh, geez, didn't we just all laugh at the Tajik minister of communications and get Facebook opened up again with the help of the US ambassador?! And now Twitter is down and all the Russian social network sites!

Yes, this is terrible. Most likely it will end in two days. Or maybe 7 days. It's not like Russian troops in Tajikistan are going to get those sites right back up, any more than whatever US military are in Tajikistan got Facebook working again but...Russian troops need those sites, too, so it's not over yet. It's more about which providers are hooked up to which members of the Family in charge of the whole country, and what's in it for them. Watch this space.

Also I think the head of the Internet Service Providers Association, which is independent but subject to governmental directives, got it about right -- it's not about perfidious US envoys who care only about their own California corporations or Russian indifference to their own business people, as @etajikistan was implying last week; it's more about the Tajik elections in a year. Every single resource available, administrative or otherwise, will be deployed in keeping the same set in power.

We all worry about how Tajikistan will develop, especially when foreign NGOs are increasingly blocked, social media is blocked, and domestic NGOs defunded or de-legitimized. How will these groups survive?

Tajikistan has ordered local Internet providers to block Twitter, one of more than 100 sites including popular Russian-language social networks starting next week, an industry representative told AFP Saturday.

"The (government) communications service has sent Internet companies a huge list of 131 sites that must be blocked in the country from Monday," said Asomiddin Atoyev, the head of the Tajik association of Internet providers.

So while access to Facebook was opened up last week, now Russian sites are being blocked: Vkontakte [In Touch], Odnoklassniki [Classmates], the most popular social networking sites in Russia with many users in the ex-Soviet Union, and Mail.ru, an email service.

The head of the Internet Service Providers provides an explanation:

"The next presidential elections will be held in Tajikistan in November 2013, and this will bring even more harsh control of Internet resources and independent media," predicted the head of the National Association of Independent Media of Tajikistan, Nuriddin Karshiboyev.

Just in time for the holidays, Tajikkino has released a DVD box set collection of documentaries on Emomali Rahmon's activities as Tajikistan's president during the last 20 years.

Each year of Rahmon's presidency is detailed on a separate disk, twenty in all, with the remaining seven disks of the 27-disk collection dedicated to Rahmon's role in developing various sectors of the country.

Among those seven are films such as "Emomali Rahmon and Food Security" and "Emomali Rahmon and Energy Independence."

The US seldom says anything about Tajikistan from Washington, but the US mission to the OSCE is empowered to make critical statements -- and thank God it does. Here's a statement as delivered by Ambassador Ian Kelly, to the Permanent Council, Vienna, December 13, 2012

The United States notes with concern that a court in Tajikistan ordered the NGO Amparo to close on October 24, 2012, citing alleged minor administrative irregularities in the organization’s operations. We support Amparo's recently expressed intention to appeal the court's ruling, as the organization seeks to continue its important work. Amparo has worked tirelessly since 2005 to empower the youth of Tajikistan through human rights education and to monitor the human rights situation of some of Tajikistan’s most vulnerable groups, including orphans and the disabled. Amparo is an integral part of the burgeoning civil society tapestry in Tajikistan. Its efforts are precisely the sort of activities that every country should encourage in its civil society in order to strengthen the rule of law, democratization, and respect for human rights.

The United States calls on the government of Tajikistan to reinstate Amparo’s license to operate consistently with OSCE commitments to respect and protect freedom of association. We further call on Tajikistan to refrain from similar actions against other NGOs working to improve life for Tajikistan’s people.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

WANTED: A LAWYER WHO CAN TAKE THIS SILLY DEVELOPMENT JOB AND MAKE IT INTO SOMETHING USEFUL TO PEOPLE

And if it's anything like the hundreds of other jobs in this business, the person who is drafted to fill it will be hired because he has already proven himself as a US bureaucrat, and is able to fill out elaborate report forms and draft budgets, and not because he can actually push the envelop in Dushanbe.

When I read the wimpy job description, I wish they could add things like this:

o Establish contact with practicing lawyers who defend human rights victims and do what you can to assist their work even quietly and help them if they get in trouble; meet those lawyers who protested the whopping punitive fines on their media clients, or those still brave enough to try to help those accused of extremism;

o Keep trying to get the Tajik authorities to lift their ban on the registration of the human rights group Amparo and let lawyers into the courtrooms where "extremists" are being tried;

o Make sure you invite a wide variety of people to your programs, not just the approved and combed government lawyers or officials but people both with and without law licenses;

o Help people with everything from literature and ideas to contacts and pointers to sources of funding to go behind your own silly little program;

o Be careful what you tell diplomats, you could be WikiLeaked. Practice good online security and be well-behaved offline -- nobody likes drunken, ugly Americans who also hit on the locals;

o Keep your go-bag packed by the door, because you may be expelled suddenly because you are doing a good job -- and have a zip drive of your stuff ready to roll and easy contact of all major news and diplomats who can easily protest your expulsion;

You get the idea. I don't think enough people do it this way. Yeah, I get it that I'm writing a description for a Human Rights Watch job that in fact should also have in it "Be willing to accept and roll with death threats emanating from close watch of your personal life by creepy people."

But still. More can be injected into these anodyne roles and never is.

Is this Kazimir Malevich's famous Black Square painting? Or is it Kulyab at night? You have your answer from the Tajik blogger Hasavor, who blogs in Russian here (and hasn't gotten the memo yet from foreign planners that would instruct him to stop using Russian so we can all share in his insights). Translation:

"How is it possible that in a country that sells electricity to Afghanistan and builds the highest flagpoles in the world, gigantic (although empty) libraries, enormous mosques and super-expensive residential complexes for rich people doesn't have enough electricity for ordinary people"?

"We continue to live in the stone age. The people are chopping tees for firewood, heating stoves with dung fuel and buying up coal for the winter."

Like Russia, which has gotten a lot more attention doing this, Tajikistan has cracked down on foreign-funded activities; in October, there was an official ban on foreign-funded seminars and conferences. Hey, do these CIS leaders attention their on Russian-funded conferences where they plot and harmonize these things?!

I'm going to try to be very upset that somebody can't have an all-expense-paid seminar in Dushanbe, truly I am, but the real problem with this is that the per-diems that can keep Tajiks alive also dry up with something like this and the contacts that can be helpful even in silly development jobs.

And of course, scrutiny of foreign funding then is the next thing to come.

Western diplomats are shocked at the ban, since international NGOs play an enormous role in the country’s economy, public health, and infrastructure. Students are traditionally the main target of these NGOs in developing countries such as Tajikistan, which is still recovering from years of stagnant Soviet rule.

This role isn't without its controversies as we've reported regarding the Agha Khan Foundation.

The question then becomes how you can support NGO activity in Tajikistan if the government bans it.

And you have to ask the question that if the government is banning it for some, why isn't it for others? And what is to be done about sorting this out?

This organization -- about which I know nothing directly -- appears to be trying to solve the problem of how you survive when the UN doesn't renew your original start-up grant and when perhaps you don't have other options with other big funders.

So if you're indignant about the failure to sustain NGOs, why, you can go buy a £9.95 calendar from this outfit that supports eco-tourism in the Pamirs, META, founded by UNESCO and now 'restructured' and struggling to exist on its own.

Someone will explain to me why the Agha Khan folks left these people out, or maybe it's a different opera -- I have a lot to learn. But the idea is one that might work for others.

I'm just trying to figure out who can pose for "March" for the "torture" concept that some other groups need to illustrate their causes on their calendars. Anybody to pose for "June" for "domestic violence"? Ok, back to the pretty mountains...

"Access to clean water one of most pressing environmental challenges," is the way the UN directly states it.

This is how they wrote the story more clearly:

The EPR finds that only one third of Tajikistan’s 7.2 million inhabitants have access to chlorinated piped water. Some 30 per cent rely on spring water and the remainder of the population depend on river and ditch water sources. Only five per cent of the population are connected to public sewerage.

They also mention the tailings from mines as does CA. We're going to keep hearing about those 55 million tons of radioactive waste in every conceivable way under every conceivable rubric -- because it makes a good scare headline -- until the cows come home -- or they don't, and die glowing. It's not as if nothing is being done about this problem, as we reported, but it's a perfect storm of problems in Tajikistan, and this is just one more thing.

You know how I said we don't have very many polls really to explain the attitudes of Tajiks to Islam, extremism, the treatment of suspected Islamic extremists and terrorists in their country, and so on. Well, we don't.

But, to fill the gap, there is always Iranian TV!

Say, if you want the polls to come out right, pay for them yourself and put them on state-controlled TV in an authoritarian state, I always say.

But there's more -- and totally predictable, about Israel:

The Zionist entity was least favorably viewed with 57.5 percent of
respondents choosing negative and very negative to describe their
feeling about the regime. England and France followed the Zionist entity
with 30.6 and 28.8 percent respectively.

Evil Satan America is not even mentioned, and perhaps not mentionable.

Well, this is what you get from a poll about the two Persian speaking members who are members of the Economic Cooperation Organization, as Iranian TV helpfully explains.

In the piece he links to, about the controversial film about hunting bin Ladn called Zero Dark Thirty, Ty McCormick interviews Ali Soufan, who says this:

We also need to study the incubating factors that promote terrorism. What are the factors in South Yemen that are making people and tribes join al Qaeda? For example, one sheikh, when asked why he was sheltering al Qaeda fighters, responded that the government had promised to send him six teachers. Fahd al-Quso brought 16 teachers. In some areas al Qaeda has also supplied electricity and water. These things don't cost much, and we used to give billions of dollars to the Yemeni government, but most of it went to line pockets. It did not reach ordinary people. So we have to deal with the roots of the problem: What are the incubating factors for terrorism? And there's no cookie-cutter approach to this. What works in South Yemen probably won't work in the north of the country, and what works in Saudi Arabia probably won't work in Libya, because there's a range of incubating factors. Sometimes it's sectarian, sometimes it's tribal, sometimes it's economic, but the roots are never religious or ideological.

We could add that what works in Yemen won't work in Tajikistan, either. But for Ali to tell us that the roots are "never" religious or ideological is just plain daft. Of course they are religious -- extremist forms of Islam -- and of course they are ideological -- and some Islamism got its start with copying Marxism-Leninism, and it's okay to say that. Every single Central Asian regime sees it that way, and our job isn't to pretend they aren't seeing some real problems with extremism (how did the Arab Spring turn out) but to persuade them to address it in less abusive ways.

Ideas matter, people think about them and study them and talk about them and then sometimes they do them, and we should follow that and not blank it out of the equation. If it were possible to fix countries by just 10 more teachers for every Al Qaeda gifting of teachers (and what kind of teachers those might be!), USAID would have triumphed in every corner of the world by now; OSCE too.

Come on, Yemen and Tajikistan are not really so alike, although to the "progressives" in Washington with their my-focals, any place where there is American activity can all seem alike and all evil.

o Yemen gets some US aid, but a lot more from Russian and China -- say, ditto Tajikistan but the dynamics are different as the number of US military in Tajikistan is dwarfed by the number of Russian military.

Russia has stolen a march over the United States in the multimillion-dollar arms market in cash-strapped Yemen, whose weapons purchases are being funded mostly by neighboring Saudi Arabia.

The Yemeni armed forces, currently undergoing an ambitious modernization program worth an estimated $4 billion US, are equipped with weapons largely from Russia, China, Ukraine, eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics.

With the attempted bombing of a US airliner on Christmas Day by a Nigerian student, reportedly trained by al-Qaeda in Yemen, the administration of President Barack Obama has pledged to double. Yemen’s military and counter-terrorism aid, to nearly $150 million, to strengthen the besieged government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

I've just spent the same half hour looking online that I've spent many times before trying to find the exact dollar number for how much US military aid goes to Tajikistan, and it's hard to do and there aren't clear answers -- but I think it's a VERY safe belt that it is not $4 billion, you know? It's more like that $150 million to Yemen, that looks very insignifant to Russia and China -- whose aid never stirs the blood of the NGOs and the pundits in Washington like US aid.

Yes, Nate can say something like this not only because Russia and China simply don't bother him as much as America -- he's American and in America and it's easier to reach: CENTCOM is directly involved with Tajikistan -- they're easier to scold than Russia not only because they are closer to hand but because they tell you what they are doing. We also know about the "secret drone war" in Yemen because we have free media to cover it; the Russian free media, such as it is, is preoccupied usually with other things.

Yes. But it's better than -- if you'll forgive the expression -- a stick in the eye.

One does have to worry about a law that tries to solve modern problems -- all the men having to go work abroad and some of the women also having to go do that now, too, instead of herding goats -- and then tries to perpetuate ancient solutions to them from institutions that have now broken up (like the family) or which, like the elders may help certain patriarchal traditions best left discontinued, like wife-beating.

UNFPA also tries to get the Islamic elders in Sudanese society to do more to get the African men to stem the epidemic of rape of women. Sometimes it works. Generally, it doesn't.

WHAT CAN YOU DO ABOUT BIG NEIGHBOURS AND BIG POWERS THAT DON'T HELP YOU VERY MUCH

Alexander Cooley ‏@CooleyOnEurasia tweets about a new report from Finland:

The report is by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland EUCAM Security and Development project implemented by FRIDE and the Karelian Institute of the University of Eastern Finland -- and one bonus from clicking on that link is that you will sort out all these acronyms and what they mean.

The EUCAM-SD is a key component of the EUCAM programme and focuses on the links between security challenges in the Central Asian region and the need for development in the broadest sense, including governance, poverty reduction, ethnic tension and social equality.

I could only take the time to skim it now, but it looks useful. Let me say this: this report comes from a country that has also itself had to grapple with the problem of having a very big neighbour on its border who, well, Finlandized it. Tajikistan has that same big neighbour, too.